A Freegan Extension

My family and I are building 2 storey extension to our house, "simple enough" you might say... True, except we're not doing this the usual way.

The 'usual' way is to get plans drawn, apply for various approvals, get quotes from builders and start building. There are two reasons we're not doing things this way:

Its Expensive! With a build such as this you can expect to pay around £1000 per square metre. Our extension is going to be 3.5 metres wide by 6.7 metres deep, with two floors giving us a total area of 46.9 square metres... well you know what's coming, its an anticipated cost of £46,900. I can't justify spending this (and neither can my bank!)

Its Wasteful! Recycling in the construction industry has improved greatly over the last decade, however 22 million tonnes of construction waste is still sent to landfill every year. We find it somewhat galling that so much goes to waste when it could reasonably be reused and recycled.

The effect this has on our build is that we are going to use recycled materials wherever we can and we are doing the actual building ourselves to reduce labour costs.

We are realistic about this, its going to be difficult, very difficult. However, we realised that sitting around bemoaning the fact that we couldn't afford an extension wasn't actually going to achieve anything. So we decided that we would start preparing for a build and that's where we are now.

To achieve this we need help. We need materials mainly and hope to prevail upon you, our readers to help make this happen. We want you to let us know if you have unused building materials which might otherwise be lying around your builders yard, back garden or heading for the tip. If you don't have any materials to offer, maybe you have some expertise you'd like to share. All offers of help are most welcome! If you want to see the specifics of what we need head over to the 'what we need' page. We are not being naive, we know that we will be buying and procuring a lot of the materials in the conventional fashion, we are simply looking to reduce our costs and the carbon footprint of this build, wherever we can.

We are going to use these pages as central hub for all news and information about the Freegan Extension. So please feel free to have a nose around. However, you might want to start at our facebook page. If you want to tweet about this on twitter, please use the hashtag #freeganextension.